Young people stand up for Honolulu rail in front of an anti-transit forum featuring Randal O'Toole.

There are few things we enjoy more than a good smack-down of the anti-transit faux libertarian Randal O’Toole, except perhaps a good show of people power in support of sustainable transportation. Luckily, a new post from Network blog Say Yes to the Honolulu Rail System has both:

“PowerPoint presentations were no match tonight for good old-fashioned chanting. On one side, a panel of rail critics with their charts and graphs. On the other, west side families who say, ‘Enough talk already. Let’s get this train built!’”

According to author Doug Carlson, the pro-transit activists were able to overcome the sprawl-boosters’ slideshows not only through the strength of their organizing, but by demolishing their opponents’ arguments:

Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute flooded the audience with statistics to “prove” transit is failing to attract riders even as cities grow. For example, he said the population in Atlanta, GA has doubled since the 1980s, yet transit’s share of trips taken by residents has fallen by half.

That’s it – no further explanation required, Mr. O’Toole reasons, yet that’s exactly the result you’d expect when suburbs are built that require continued dependence on America’s car culture for mobility.

Oahu’s population growth is being channeled to west Oahu, a region bordered by mountains and an ocean, unlike Atlanta and Houston and other mainland cities mentioned in the visitors’ statistical presentations. Left unaddressed by these highway advocates is Honolulu’s unique long and lean layout that transit experts for decades have said is ideal for a rail transit system.

The rail project is expected to be a top issue in Honolulu’s mayoral election this fall.

Elsewhere on the Network: Seattle Bike Blog rounds up the street safety legislative agenda in Olympia. Reno Rambler looks back at the hyperbolic bike safety public service announcements of the 1940s. And Stop and Move offers extremely good news to urbanists everywhere: Sim City 5 is coming out next year.

There are anti-transit activists? What a weird thing to do. Sounds fishy.

Reid Davis

Randal O’Toole is not only intellectually dishonest, he’s also bought-and-paid-for by sprawl and road-building interests. He deserves to be truth squadded mercilessly.

D.K.

This
guy, along with his intellectual fellow travelers Joel Kotkin and
Wendell Cox, are the Grover Norquists of the public transportation
sphere.

http://ocschwar.livejournal.com/ ocschwar

O’Toole is a liar, pure and simple. His favorite trope is to look up the sale prices of urban homes and call those prices the “cost” in order to make the case that suburban living is more efficient.

He of course knows full well that there is a difference between the cost of a home and its value, and that the reason urban homes cost more is that there is an artificial scarcity of them (imposed by the same policies he advocates), and yet he continues to push this lie.

Because his living depends on it.

Paul Schimek

I’m not defending O’Toole, but there are legitimate issues concerning new rail project investments, which often end up costing much more than anticipated. Ridership figures can be inflated because bus routes are redirected to “feed” the rail stations, and each separate boarding is counted. New York transit advocates are rightly open to the idea of high-quality bus-based transit, and that can work well elsewhere. Questioning expensive rail (or bus, for that matter) projects is not always anti-transit. It’s better to spend transit dollars efficiently — it is just wishful thinking to believe that a dollar spent on transit is a dollar not spent on highways, more likely, it is a dollar not spent on “state of good repair” for our existing transit systems.

Anonymous

The thing is, Honolulu cannot sprawl. Mother nature and the Tourist economy has pretty much ensured that one. And look at what Interstate H3 cost to build.

Charles_Siegel

There is a bit of news today about O’Toole’s employer, the Cato Institute:

“Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, the deep-pocketed conservative
activists, launched a court fight yesterday over control of the Cato
Institute, one of the nation’s best-known free-market think tanks. The Washington-based public-policy group was founded in 1974 as the Charles Koch Foundation. The
name was changed to Cato in 1976, with the Koch brothers as
longstanding contributors. The group had four shareholders until last
year: Charles Koch; David Koch; Edward H. Crane III, Cato’s president;
and William A. Niskanen, who died in October.”http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/01/435455/pollutocrat-deniers-charles-and-david-koch-file-suit-to-take-over-cato-insitute/

Cato obviously produces the best analysis that dirty-energy money can buy.

I was quite proud when O’Toole panned my book about city planning, Unplanning: Livable Cities and Political Choices. http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=3196 His main criticism of me was that I am not a libertarian – about the level of intellectual depth that I expect from him.

http://district5diary.blogspot.com/ Rob Andeson

Why is the anti-car, Smart Growth movement so smitten with costly rail projects? The Honolulu project is like other rail projects: it tries to sell it by underestimating costs and exaggerating ridership and future benefits, like the California high-speed rail project.

Fortunately, people in Hawaii are wising up. Public opinion has turned against the project.

Stan

Wow. What a typically stupid O’Toole “refudiation”.

Let’s boil down his message: “Cars=Good, Not Cars=Bad, Planes=OK as long as you get to the airport via a Car, Sidewalks=Bad, Trains=Bad, More Highwyas paid for by the Government=The Free Market in Action”.

Yeah, O’Toole’s a liar. No question about it. What D.K. said about him, Kotkin, and Cox is true. The 3 Horseman of the anti-transit, pro-highway agenda.

DerekGlaxa

More wishful thinking from the Peanut Gallery, I see. By the way, people in my part of Calif. are supporting the HSR project. The CHSR, Westside subway in LA, and SF’s Central Subway are going to be built come hell or high water.

jace t.

Yeah the people fighting the train are fighting a losing battle. In another generation, with permanently high oil prices, everyone will wonder what all the anti-transit furor of the turn of the century was all about.

http://ocschwar.livejournal.com/ ocschwar

Rob, are you sincerely asking the question or are you just being rhetorical and trolling here?

You’ve asked this question before. You got your answers before. Do you have memory troubles?

http://district5diary.blogspot.com/ Rob Andeson

You folks are all in a lather about O’Toole and the Koch Bros, but that’s just a variation of the ad hominem fallacy. As a Democrat and an Obama supporter, I have to admit that the right-wingers are right about these big rail projects. Instead of building overpriced rail systems, we should be propping up existing transit systems, Here in SF, City Hall is pouring $300 million into a dumb subway system even as our Muni bus system is chronically in the red and cutting service.

I’m not sure that there’s anything “libertarian” about O’Toole’s position on transit anyway—our road system is about as pure an example of mega-expensive government-subsidized social engineering as there ever was…

I agree with what you said. Mother nature and the Tourist economy has pretty much ensured that one.

Miles Bader

”Follow the money” …

Miles Bader

haha, “intellectual” … :/

Miles Bader

Maybe you don’t intend to “defend O’Toole” but you’re clearly a bit of a bus fanboy, and you seem to be parroting many of his talking points…

They key is: build what’s best for the individual situation, not just now, but in the future; don’t save a penny now if it means wasting a dollar tomorrow. Sometimes buses are the best solution (sparse feeder routes), but often they are not, and rail is the proper solution (backbone network, high-density development) even if it means a much larger up-front investment.

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